In current physical vapor deposition (PVD) chambers, a process shield is typically mounted to the main body of the PVD chamber, separately from the target. The target is typically mounted on a removable lid of the PVD chamber and then lowered onto the chamber body for processing. However, the inventors have discovered that such a configuration may undesirably result in the process shield and the target being inaccurately aligned. The inventors have further discovered for applications using higher frequencies of radio frequency (RF) energy applied to the target, the alignment between the target and shield becomes more critical to controlling any plasma irregularity and arc events, which may negatively affect the quality of deposition in the PVD chamber. Current PVD chambers utilize features that are separate from the target and the process shield to align the two components. However, the inventors have observed that such features fail to adequately align the target and process shield for certain applications.
Accordingly, the inventors have provided improved apparatus for PVD processing.